Collabor8now!http://collabor8now.com
None of us is as smart as all of us.Mon, 08 Oct 2018 16:25:12 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.812 Key Steps for Building an Online Communityhttp://collabor8now.com/collaboration/12-key-steps-for-building-an-online-community/
http://collabor8now.com/collaboration/12-key-steps-for-building-an-online-community/#respondMon, 26 Mar 2018 13:48:54 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2327Read More12 Key Steps for Building an Online Community]]>The following is a list of the critical points to consider when embarking on a project or plan to build an online community. This information is available within various other Collabor8now Ltd blog posts and Slideshare presentations, but for convenience I’ve curated these into a single post. The items have been kept deliberately brief, but further and detailed information (with relevant citations and references) can be provided on request.

1. Ensure you have community facilitator/community manager with strategic oversight for the platform and business goals. It takes a lot of time and effort to convert a new community member into an active community member. The community manager’s role is to build relationships with and between members, initiate discussions, prompt members to participate and slowly increase their interest. Relevant skills for a manager/facilitator are:

Engagement & People Skills

Content Development Skills

Business & Strategic Skills

Technical Skills

2. Focus on the people and not the technology. Keep the technology simple to begin with, e.g. threaded conversations, themed groups, polls and integration with corporate email (e.g. for activity updates). The most important aspect is making it easy for members to find and connect with each other.

3. Start slow and think small. The community needs to work small before it can work big. Community building is a slow process of stimulating interactions, building relationships and fostering social capital. It begins small and grows with time, at its own pace. It can take anything between 3 to 12 months to get the community to a stage where it’s generating its own discussions/content.

4. Consider having a low-key community launch workshop. Don’t make this a big publicity promotion – it may raise unrealistic expectations.

5. Be prepared to devote time and effort in attracting the first 50 members. Start with personal invitations to key contacts. Involve this “founder” group in strategic planning for the platform and communities and encourage them to be advocates, e.g. ask them for promotional ideas to help launch the community. Will they be willing to tell their friends about the community? Who do they know with an interest in the topic?

6. Start with as few themed groups as possible. Too many often means it will be hard to create a community feel; conversations will be diluted and stretched too thin. It’s difficult for members to get to know each other if you’ve got dozens of different groups with little or no activity.

7. Focus, encourage and nurture active members. Be aware that members are fickle beasts. They may check things out, but it takes a lot of personal attention to keep them interested. Otherwise they come, browse around for a few seconds and then vanish back into the corporate wilderness.

8. Welcome newcomers to the platform. Make them feel wanted.

9. Reach out consistently to new members; ask them what they want from their community rather than enforcing an environment that the business wants.

10. Don’t control the conversations. Let the users decide what is important and in their own voice.

11. Don’t set unrealistic or meaningless management targets. Getting people to register is relatively easy – if that’s a goal. Better to measure numbers and growth rates of active members.

12. Once the community is up and running, consider having regular community events, for example:

Webinars on a key topic of interest.

Themed and facilitated discussions. A community could join a live chat room to participate in a themed discussion. This discussion will have a set topic.

Weekly Interview. Similar to the themed discussion, this is a weekly interview with a VIP or “expert” on a particular topic.

Competitions/Challenges. The community may host a regular competition or challenge for members to participate in.

Newcomer orientation. Once a month, a community may host a day to welcome new arrivals in the community. This can involve regular members introducing themselves, setting up some basics threads for newcomers to participate in and help teach members about the culture of the community.

Product-Launches. A community might celebrate the launch of a new product or service.

Member achievements. The community may also celebrate the achievements of a member. This might be about a promotion, the birth of a child, a marriage, etc.

Next Steps

Collabor8now Ltd can support and assist community building projects in the following areas:-

A facilitated community launch workshop, to include:

Developing a community plan

Communications and promotion

Key roles and responsibilities

Developing a community charter

Community Manager Training

A one-day event, tailored to specific customer requirements.

For more information, contact steve.dale@collabor8now.com

]]>http://collabor8now.com/collaboration/12-key-steps-for-building-an-online-community/feed/0Taxonomies vs. Folksonomieshttp://collabor8now.com/information-management/taxonomies-vs-folksonomies-2/
http://collabor8now.com/information-management/taxonomies-vs-folksonomies-2/#respondTue, 23 May 2017 09:18:22 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2283Read MoreTaxonomies vs. Folksonomies]]>(This is an update to a post originally published in November 2006 – but still relevant today)

The debate about the various merits of taxonomies vs. folksonomies will probably continue long after I’ve departed this mortal life; it’s the lifeblood of dyed-in-the-wool information professionals. Based on experience I’ve had in implementing enterprise search solutions, users presented with either a taxonomic organisation of content vs. doing a keyword or free-text search for what they are seeking, the vast majority of users will choose a free-text search. The reason being that users don’t want to spend valuable time trying to understand the taxonomy, and particularly where the new breed of search engine is able to return relevant results AND cater for the serendipitous nature of some search queries. Interestingly, Verity (since bought by Autonomy, which was itself bought by Hewlett Packard….are you keeping up?!) had developed a collaborative taxonomy facility for their K2 search engine, where common terms could be identified for taxonomy labels. It sounds to me that they had recognised the limitations of the inflexible top-down taxonomy approach and were heading towards the realms of folksonomies. A strategy since adopted by nearly all of the current batch of enterprise search engines.

Folksonomies are not only frequently more useful than top-down taxonomies; they better reflect the bottom-up, messy, ambiguous, inconsistent, social nature of meaning, despite Aristotle and the tradition his genius spawned.

I couldn’t have put it better myself!

]]>http://collabor8now.com/information-management/taxonomies-vs-folksonomies-2/feed/0Trends in Big Data, Data Analytics and AIhttp://collabor8now.com/data/trends-in-big-data-data-analytics-and-ai/
http://collabor8now.com/data/trends-in-big-data-data-analytics-and-ai/#respondFri, 11 Nov 2016 10:08:43 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2261Read MoreTrends in Big Data, Data Analytics and AI]]>Eric Schmidt (Google) was famously quoted in 2010 as saying “There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilisation through 2003, but that much information is now created in 2 days”. More recently, it was reported that 90% of data in the world today is only 2 years old.

We probably don’t need to understand what an ‘exabyte’ is, but we can get a sense that it must be pretty big, and that it’s not just about size; there’s a component of velocity involved. If the rate of information was doubling every 2 days in 2010, we can be pretty sure it’s something less than 2 days now.

Most organisations still don’t know what data or information they actually have, and what they’re creating and storing on a daily basis, with one survey revealing that 52% of all information is considered to be ‘Dark’, where value is unknown, and 33% of information is considered to be redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT). According to Veritas, left unchecked, hoarded data on this scale could mean that companies in Europe face $891bn of avoidable storage costs globally by 2020.

On a positive note, more and more organisations are beginning to realise these massive archives of data might actually hold some useful information that could potentially deliver new business opportunities. The problem is, without the right technology, it takes time to access, analyse, interpret and make decisions on these vast data repositories. In the mean-time, the world – and more agile business competitors – have moved on.

Paradoxically, there remains a fundamental scepticism about the practical use of data to drive the business. The explosion of data, new analytics techniques and machine learning have combined to create a degree of uncertainty about data driven decision making. Organisations are beginning to reflect on whether they are working with the right data; whether they can rely on algorithms to make decisions, or whether they are thinking the right way about using data to compete.

But the trend is clear. More and more organisations are changing, or plan to change the big decision making process because of big data, new analytics and use of AI, and specifically machine learning. Machine learning has the ability to scale across a broad spectrum of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, sourced from, for example, contract management, customer service, finance, legal, sales, pricing and production. Machine learning algorithms are iterative in nature, constantly learning and seeking to optimise outcomes. Every time a miscalculation is made, machine learning algorithms correct the error and begin another iteration of the data analysis. These calculations happen in milliseconds which makes machine learning exceptionally efficient at optimising decisions and predicting outcomes.

Executives who once relied firmly on their intuition and experience are now face-to-face with machines that can learn from massive amounts of data. It is changing people’s relationships with technology and opening the door to truly data-driven decision-making.

It is reasonable to assume that management intuition and experience will remain critical for interpreting the results, even though there is ample evidence to show that decisions made by humans can be inherently biased. For example, confirmation bias might lead executives to cherry-pick data that supports their viewpoint; or they might discard data that contradicts their gut feeling. They can’t see what lies within the data.

The challenge going forward is for C-suite executives and managers to integrate these two factors, to find a new mix of mind and machine. One thing is for certain, we’re going to have to start trusting the machines and the algorithms if we ever want to extract real value from big data and make decisions with the increasing velocity that competitive business requires!

]]>http://collabor8now.com/data/trends-in-big-data-data-analytics-and-ai/feed/0Learning Before, During and Afterhttp://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/learning-before-during-and-after/
http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/learning-before-during-and-after/#respondWed, 10 Aug 2016 13:05:42 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2245Read MoreLearning Before, During and After]]>I’ve made it a personal choice to avoid the perennial discussions and debates about defining “knowledge management”, which more often than not seem to focus on the typology and semantics rather than getting to grips with the actual practice. I like simplicity, and whatever your preference for intellectually precise definitions, it inevitably boils down to the actions that encourage and support learning, and specifically, learning before, during and after.

”Each project and each stage of each project, will need to import knowledge. Knowledge will be needed to deliver the project stage, and the tasks and activities within that stage. The project team will need to learn before they start, in order to access the knowledge they need. As the project stages continue, the project team will learn as they go. Some processes are needed for capturing that knowledge, and taking action to improve team performance based on the new knowledge. At the end of each project stage, the new knowledge that has been gained needs to identified and captured, for passing on to the next stage, or for passing onto other projects. At each stage therefore, the knowledge needs to be imported, gathered, applied, captured, documented and exported”.

Knowledge management (KM) encourages this learning at every opportunity. The concept is about learning before, during and after, and can be applied to any activity including projects, tasks and events.

This means that when you start a new piece of work, you should check if anyone has done something similar before and if there is anything you can learn from them. Then while you are working on that piece of work there should be a stage (or several) where you reflect on what you have done so far to help you decide how to continue forward. This brings you to the final stage of learning, when you have completed the piece of work. It is recommended that you review the work so that if you or someone else were to do a similar piece of work again, the approach and desired outcomes can be improved following your review.

The table below is a useful guide showing which KM tools and techniques can be applied before, during and after.

If you’re not too sure about the processes for each of the tools and techniques mentioned above, check out this free resource originally developed by the Improvement & Development Agency (long gone, but its heritage remains!)

]]>http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/learning-before-during-and-after/feed/0A Communities of Practice (CoP) Health Checkhttp://collabor8now.com/communities-of-practice/a-communities-of-practice-cop-health-check/
http://collabor8now.com/communities-of-practice/a-communities-of-practice-cop-health-check/#commentsThu, 14 Jan 2016 15:46:29 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2231Read MoreA Communities of Practice (CoP) Health Check]]>What does a successful Community of Practice (CoP) look like? Success will of course depend on the purpose of the community. Some CoPs have been set up as networks for learning and sharing; others have a defined output, e.g. developing new practice for adult social care. It is clearly more difficult to establish success criteria for a CoP dedicated to knowledge sharing than it is for – say – a CoP that has a tangible output. Success for the former will rely on more subjective analysis than for the latter, where there will probably be more tangible evidence of an output, e.g. a policy document or case study.

However, rather than argue and debate the criteria for assessing the “success” of a CoP (or other organizational learning system), I’d prefer to consider how we monitor and assess the “health” of a CoP. For this approach I think we have to consider the analogy of a CoP to a living and breathing organism.

A healthy CoP will show clear signs of life; this can be assessed using various quantitative indicators, such as:

Number of members

Rate of growth of the community

Number and frequency of documents uploaded.

Number and frequency of documents read or downloaded.

Number and frequency of new blog posts

Number and frequency of forum posts

Number and frequency of comments

Number of page views per session

Time spent on the CoP per browser session

…etc.

Not that any one of these indicators in isolation will indicate the good health of a CoP, but taken together they can give a general perspective of how vibrant and active the community is.

Continuing with the analogy of a living, breathing organism, different CoPs will have different metabolisms, some may be highly active; others may be fairly sedate. Understanding the community ‘rhythm’ is a key aspect of knowing when any intervention is required in order to maintain this rhythm. Not all CoPs are going to be vibrant and active all of the time; there may be periods of relative inactivity as a natural part of the CoP lifecycle. But it’s important to know the difference between a CoP that is going through a regular period of inactivity and a CoP that is moribund.

A point to note: inactive CoPs may not necessarily be a cause for concern. One reason for inactivity could be that the CoP has served its purpose and its members have moved on. In which case the knowledge assets of the CoP need to be published and celebrated and the CoP either closed, or (with the agreement of the members) re-purposed to a new topic or outcome.

So, understanding the vital life-signs and metabolism of a CoP is a fundamental part of ensuring the continued good health of the CoP, and therefore more likely to achieve its goals. And the key to the continued good health of a CoP is knowing how and when to intervene when one or more of the life-signs begins to falter. Without wishing to labour my analogy of the living, breathing organism too much, it’s the equivalent of knowing when someone is not feeling too well and administering the appropriate medicine.

Community Health Checks

As I mentioned earlier, the life cycle of a community will be subject to a particular rhythm, which can vary from CoP to CoP. Understanding this rhythm will help inform if and when specific interventions are necessary.

Participation can wane; the number of posts slow down; fewer people show up; only a few people are generating plans for the next activity. But not all lapses in content and contribution mean a community’s life is over. In many cases, some specific diagnosis and actions can reinvigorate a community.

Identifying the Symptoms

The “actions” in the table below are suggested primarily for community facilitators/e-moderators but in fact any CoP member can take the initiative to rejuvenate the community.

Symptoms and Actions for Improving Community Participation

Symptom

Actions

No participation or activity.

· No new documents or links posted

· No new discussion threads, announcements or news

Post new content, requesting feedback and comments to elicit new conversation.

Remind people to set alerts for the site.

Talk to members to find out what people are working on and ask people what they would like to see on it.

Activity only by a few people

Call or email members who haven’t participated for a while; find out why they haven’t been participating. Use those conversations to elicit new content and encourage contribution.

Also be sure that the people who are not contributing understand how to use the tools. Never assume that tools are “intuitive” to everyone, or that everyone understands how to use them.

People use email instead of posting questions and discussions on the CoP

The email habit is a hard one to break. If the goal of the community is to capture all the relevant discussions for future use, then the community facilitator needs to take a strong stand with members.

One way to do this is to make a public statement that no questions sent by individual email will be answered, but that questions posted to the community will always be answered in set time. Another approach is to respond to all email questions by asking the requestor to post the question in the forum.

Sudden drop in discussions where there was previous activity.

If there was a lot of active discussion and then it quickly dies out. Review the postings for potential “flaming”. Edit the discussion threads to remove inappropriate comments (and state that you have done so). Speak with the people who have posted and clarify the norms for participation of the community.

Another community is focused on the same topic.

If the members of the other community are current or previous members of your community, talk to them about why the community isn’t meeting their needs. If they do want to take a specific focus, then be sure that you have set up cross-linkages to the other community sites, and are referring people back and forth as needed.

If the new community consists of people who are not participating in the current community, ask some of the same questions. See if there is sufficient overlap that the new community might be better managed as a Sub – CoP of the current site or a merger between the communities.

Reinvigoration

Community facilitation/e-moderation is about creating and sustaining relationships, not just the facilitators’/e-moderator’s relationships with the individual members, but the members’ relationships among themselves. Reinvigorating the community involves restoring “social capital” to the community in a way that motivates and encourages people to re-engage and commit. The table below lists some practical interventions – things you can do to alter the current dynamics – that can have a positive impact on the community.

Reinvigoration Of Communities

Intervention

Potential Impact on Community

Request sponsor support

Talk to the sponsors of the community.

If the sponsor expects the community to be collaborating and operating as a community, ask them to show some visible support to the community, invite them to participate, or to spend time with the community reviewing the community site and making suggestions and providing resources to support it.

Informal get-togethers (face-to-face or virtual)

Face to face (or online or phone) meetings can range from very informal to highly formal and structured. It’s important to give people a reason to show up – but once people are together they have the opportunity to make or renew acquaintance, find topics of common interest, and share recent experiences.

Communicate more frequently

Create a “newsletter” that consists of items describing what may (or may not) be happening in the community, but also what different community members may be doing. You may need to call or get in touch directly with a number of individuals to elicit their “news.”

Back channelling

A personal phone call (or a meeting) is a good way to connect one-on-one to find out people’s concerns or to hear what might be in the way of participation. For example, a community member may not be getting support from his/her manager to participate.

Invite new members

Often the way to move a community from a “stuck” to a state of activity is to introduce new members who are more outgoing, or who will ask a lot of questions of existing members.

New members introduce new ideas, alter some of the behaviour patterns and bring new connections and knowledge into the group

Have a guest speaker (Hotseat)

Bringing new ideas from outside speakers often helps a community to shift its thinking and generate new ideas. This idea can be adapted into an online event in which people from multiple disciplines are invited to contribute to a topic over a period of time.

Change the community purpose

If a community has “run out of steam,” it may be time to retire the community (with celebration!), and move on to something new.

Often if a community has built a lot of social capital and wants to stay together, they can decide on a new topical area to focus on, and create a new community or repurpose the existing community.

Develop facilitation/e-moderation skills

If a goal of the community is to engage in discussions and there is little activity, it might be good to find out how others facilitators/e-moderators go about this. Join one of the growing number of groups and communities of facilitators/e-moderators, or do a bit of ‘crowd sourcing’ on Twitter, Facebook or other social networks for answers to specific questions. If you can’t find a suitable community of facilitators/e-moderators, consider starting one for your organization!

To conclude, I will only add that one of the most important factors in ensuring the continued good health of a community (or practice, purpose, interest or whatever) is to have trained and experienced community facilitator’s (or community managers) who will continually monitor for signs of life, adding sustenance and energy where necessary, and coming equipped with the life support systems and interventions noted in the previous tables. If all of this fails (and we have to accept that some CoPs will have run their course), then let it expire gracefully, ensuring that knowledge is not lost and that lessons have been learnt.

So, your organisation has taken the plunge and invested in a shiny new enterprise social media platform. Everyone is talking about the enormous benefits to be had through collaborative working and better employee engagement. At last, you can throw off the shackles of that email inbox and really start to become more productive. But is this vision we’re being sold by the social technology vendors actually being realised, or is life just a bit more complicated than that? The answer – as usual – lies somewhere in between.

Part of the problem is our increasing reliance on technology, and a belief that it can solve all of our problems. No matter how many times we hear the mantra that “it’s not the technology, it’s the people that matter”, the task of implementing social software within the enterprise is – more often than not – addressed as an IT project. But technology doesn’t provide a solution for social interaction and human relationships. What is becoming increasingly apparent to the early adopters is that the real challenge with introducing social software is not the technology itself, but the introduction of new modes of behaviour. The reality is that the cultural aspects of the social collaboration journey are far more rigorous and require more serious attention than the implementation of technology. It really is the people that matter!

Until and unless organisations treat the implementation of social software as an organisational development (OD) activity, taking a more holistic perspective of culture, education, business processes and technology, they will struggle to gain widespread adoption across the enterprise and only partial realisation of the benefits of a more engaged and collaborative workforce.

In order to address some of these wider OD issues, it helps to understand the potential obstacles and barriers to change that are rooted in the legacy environment. These are the behaviours and conditions that have evolved over time and now rarely questioned or challenged. They are the “norm” and even new employees will adopt these patterns of behaviour in order to conform. Either that or they will decide to leave the organisation. It’s all part of the corporate survival game. Mavericks are rarely tolerated.

What do we mean by enterprise social media?

It is worth pausing for a moment to examine the flurry of new terms and buzzwords that broadly mean the same thing. The term “social media” continues to divide those who associate it with frivolous use of time, using services such as Facebook or Twitter, and those who recognise the potential value of having a far more connected and engaged society. This will ever be the case, and more of this later when examining the obstacles to collaboration.

What started as personal and consumer-led adoption of tools that enable sharing of ideas and conversations (broadly categorised as “Web 2.0”) has, over the past several years, become an integral part of new business thinking as increasingly organisations have seen the benefits of having a more joined-up workforce.

“Enterprise 2.0”, a term first coined in 2006 by Andrew McAfee to describe emergent collaboration technologies, is synonymous with the integration of social media tools and services with the corporate intranet, extranet and business processes. This term is now gradually morphing to “Social Business”, and embraces the technologies and strategies that support collaboration between the workforce, partners and stakeholders.

Enterprise Social Media is the set of tools, services, policies and protocols that have been integrated into business processes in order to facilitate and encourage engagement, collaboration and knowledge sharing within and across the organisation. These may be free-to-use services, homegrown solutions, or vendor products/applications. The potential benefits are faster access to experts and knowledge and more agile processes delivered via a people-centered organisation. Adoption of enterprise social media solutions can spur efficiency, productivity and innovation by encouraging employees and other stakeholders to share information and discuss business problems in an open, collaborative setting.

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

Given that one of the many benefits of enterprise social media is to encourage more collaboration and knowledge sharing, it is useful to look at why and how this happens. If employees are given the right tools and the right environment, will they spontaneously collaborate and share knowledge? Why do some people find it difficult to share and collaborate? If we understand these behaviours we can reinforce the ones that facilitate engagement and sharing, and discourage the ones that do the opposite.

What do we mean by collaboration?

Collaboration is when individuals or groups work together, combining their strengths and negating weaknesses to accomplish a set of goals. The important point about this definition is that the outcomes are more likely to be amplified when working together as opposed to individually

Obstacles to collaboration

Understanding the barriers and obstacles is the first step to identifying potential solutions. Individuals acting alone may not be empowered to make the desired changes, but if there is a real desire to collaborate and share knowledge, most if not all of these obstacles can be overcome or circumvented. The potential obstacles have been categorised as follows:

Emotional

Rational

Irrational

1. EMOTIONAL: resistance based on real or perceived threats

Knowledge is power

Knowledge and information hoarders exist in every organisation. However, their knowledge is likely to be one-dimensional, potentially very specialised and limited to their own small network. This can’t compare to the wealth and dynamic nature of knowledge in social networks. A case of “none of us is smarter than all of us”. Specialised and narrowly focused knowledge can soon become out of date and irrelevant, just like the knowledge hoarder

Command and control/hierarchy advantages

Some people don’t collaborate because there’s a real or perceived hierarchy in the workplace. Over the years, the leadership may have developed a culture that appears to value one person or group over another. Sharing knowledge with those higher in the hierarchy may not be welcome or valued. Sharing knowledge with those lower in the hierarchy may put you at a disadvantage, so knowledge is hoarded. Communities of Practice and Social Networks will only function effectively if there is no hierarchy, enabling knowledge to flow freely. It’s worth remembering that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy!

Sceptical middle management

Sometimes called the “marzipan layer”. You may have support from the top (the icing), and bottom-up encouragement (the cake). But middle management acts as a barrier between the two. They are more likely to understand the detailed processes that provide the foundations for how the organisation operates. They are likely to be risk-averse, since any process changes may have unpredictable consequences, and for which they may be ultimately accountable. This can have a dampening effect on the social collaboration advocates, and only persistence and demonstration of the benefits will convince middle management to support the initiative. Accept that middle managers will be the laggards and build a support network of change agents.

Fear of rejection

You have something to contribute, but previous experience leads you to believe that your opinion is not valued. Typically seen in hierarchical networks

Afraid to ask

Asking for help is a sign of weakness. Most prevalent in hierarchical structures where some perceived loss of credibility or power would results if the person had to ask for help or advice. This would, after all, put them in debt to the person, people or group that they could have consulted. Typical of opaque working practices and can result in missed opportunities for adopting good/best practice.

Fear of change

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—General Eric Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

None of us like change. A familiar routine avoids having to think and enables us stay within our comfort zone. A bit like wearing a comfortable pair of slippers. But the reality is we need to change and adapt to the environment, or we don’t survive. Complexity is all around us, and change is happening with increasing velocity. Holding back change is a bit like King Canute – with the same outcome! Introducing something which forces change is often the only answer, but the ‘disruption’ needs to be sustained in order to avoid returning to the previous status quo. Integrating social software with established business processes will create the desired change, so be clear about which tools and systems are optional and which are mandatory.

2. RATIONAL: Lack of willingness due to current ways of working

WIIFM/Lack of clear business case

What’s in it for me? It’s reasonable to seek value in what you do; otherwise you’ll consider your actions as being a waste of time. Sharing knowledge establishes a level of trust and understanding, and it’s more likely that sharing will be reciprocated, and hence reinforcing collaborative behaviour.

Lack of support from the top

Bottom-up initiatives will more likely fail to take hold unless there is some support from senior managers and directors. Ideally, collaboration initiatives need to be aligned with business or service goals. However, sometimes a degree of subversion may be the only way of gaining the attention of senior managers to the benefits of social collaboration. Freemium services such as Yammer can provide a secure and private external environment for corporate collaboration, and there are a number of examples of how an informal Yammer network started by one person has gained sufficient traction amongst employees to become officially recognised as a corporate asset.

Over-Rigid job descriptions

Tightly written and prescriptive job descriptions will create real or perceived boundaries that inhibit initiatives and taking on new responsibilities.

Micromanagement

Once assigned a task or objective by a manager, most knowledge workers will just want to get on with it, with a degree of autonomy on how they go about it. Some managers or supervisors feel the need to oversee every small detail, which discourages initiative and dis-incentivises the worker. Collaboration will probably be limited to the constraints set by the manager/supervisor.

Dissonance

This happens when managers tell people they want everyone to collaborate. But at the same time, they independently assign tasks, targets and goals to various individuals and teams. Agendas and priorities will vary and can range from complementary to conflicting.

Geography

The layout of your workplace can help or hinder collaboration. The greater the distance between colleagues, the greater the chance of miscommunication. This is not just over-reliance on e-mail when face-to-face conversation is needed, but genuine “out of sight, out of mind” lapses that keep smart people out of the brainstorming, decision making or socialising that leads to positive outcomes.

Language

Collaboration is always going to be difficult if the parties cannot make themselves understood. Try to be flexible with the communication media available; some people are better able to communicate verbally, others prefer written communication.

Culture

Not every culture is open and transparent. Employees need to be aware of rules and protocols that define collaboration with other cultures.

3. IRRATIONAL:Inability to collaborate due to lack of skills/tools or other structural issues

No tools/ poor tools/ too many tools

To be effective, collaboration has to be made simple. Intuitive tools accelerate user acceptance and can maximise the outcomes. However, tools need to be relevant and optimised to the task(s) to be completed. Too many choices result in cognitive dissonance (confusion on what to use for each task). If no tools (other than email) you belong to a dinosaur organisation. It will eventually become extinct. Decide when to move!

Information overload/ Lack of time

Research papers and employee surveys have consistently identified that the two biggest time-consumers are (1) attending meetings and (2) servicing the email inbox Employees may not have very much control over what meetings they are required to attend, though they can reasonably ask to have input to the agenda and ensure they go fully prepared in order to avoid any time being wasted debating information that has only been partially shared.

Email is a topic in its own right, but I’ll avoid becoming side-tracked here. Suffice to say it has evolved to become:

a chat-messaging platform (we send an email and get one back right away!)

a personal intranet for storing and searching for old information or documents

a broadcast channel for distributing information regardless of topic or relevance

asking a question that can’t be answered by the recipients, who then forward the email to their contacts…and so on.

a calendaring and event management system where we set up meetings.

a note-taking solution, for typing meeting notes and forwarding to yourself for saving in your email folders.

Most people would agree that email is not the best tool for collaboration and knowledge sharing, but it might be the only tool available. It requires discipline about what is shared: does everyone need to know this snippet of information? Can people collaborate on a document more effectively if it is placed in a common workspace rather than being sent as an attachment to multiple email accounts? If there is a social software solution then use it for anything other than 1 to 1 communication. Better still if the social software can be integrated with the email client. Think more critically about using the right tools for the job. If all you have is a hammer, then all you can do is bash, regardless of whether there is a nail there or not!

Inadequate training/ Education/ Support

Collaboration needs to be recognised as a key workplace skill, and included in personal learning & development plans. It’s not something that can be taught in a pedagogical sense, but can be encouraged through coaching and mentoring. Learn from those around you who freely share knowledge. How do they engage with and grow their networks? What tools do they use?

Legal /Compliance/ Security

It’s not always possible, or even desirable to have open and transparent discussion. Closed groups or communities can be used in some circumstances, but we have to accept that there are times when wider collaboration is not possible.

SOME SIMPLE STEPS TO ENCOURAGE A COLLABORATIVE AND SHARING CULTURE

Don’t think of social media as a technology; think of it as a business solution.

Be clear about the purpose and objectives of your enterprise social media strategy. What problems will it fix? What opportunities will it unlock?

Don’t assume that users will immediately see the benefits. Adoption is not something that can be forced on people. Adoption occurs when users decide for themselves that the solution provides them with a net benefit. Users very quickly weigh “what’s in it for me?” against any perceived pain, such as giving up the comfort of an old way of doing something.

Ensure the solution is intuitive to use and broadly consistent with how people use social media in the personal/private lives. Love it or hate it, Facebook has educated a whole generation of people on social technology, personal profiles, data privacy etc. An enterprise solution that is unusual or quirky will have difficulty in gaining traction.

Don’t add to the processes and technology clutter. If introducing something new, retire a legacy system.

Where possible, integrate any new social media solutions with existing technology and business processes. Since employees rely heavily on email, email integration is critical.

Find opportunities to apply collaborative solutions to business challenges where risks are minimal and business value is clear. In cautious and risk-averse organisations, safety trumps business value, so choose low risk over high business value in the early days.

Seek out social media advocates and early adopters. Promote and endorse any successes and quick wins.

Social behaviours develop over time. One successful example of collaboration is not enough. Reinforce and repeat good practice, and give sufficient time for new working practices to emerge.

Don’t give up at the first hurdle. No one ever said this was going to be an easy journey!

This article is an updated version of a White Paper published by Collabor8now in April 2013.

]]>http://collabor8now.com/collaboration/enterprise-collaboration-focus-on-behaviours-not-technology/feed/0Content Curation: The Future Of Relevancehttp://collabor8now.com/information-management/content-curation-the-future-of-relevance/
http://collabor8now.com/information-management/content-curation-the-future-of-relevance/#respondWed, 21 Jan 2015 12:03:17 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2160Read MoreContent Curation: The Future Of Relevance]]>This abstract from the editorial of December 2014 Business Information Review, providing a synopsis of a paper I produced on the topic of Content Curation. The article is aimed primarily at information professionals, but is relevant to just about anyone who struggles to cope with the daily torrent of information. The article will (I hope) go some way to reclaiming the term “content curation” from marketing roles. The skills and processes described have far wider application than brand promotion.

Steve Dale in his article on content curation exemplifies the problem of information overload in a world where everyone can publish, 24 hours a day, and many do. Google the phrase ‘everyone can publish’ and you will be overwhelmed with opportunities. LinkedIn opened the door to publishing on its platform earlier in the year (http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/linkedin-opens-its-publishing-platform-to-all-members/) – with over 3 million members, that’s a content creation whirlwind gathering momentum. Think of Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, Slideshare, and more; the growing competition among technology suppliers to deliver more attractive social platforms to organizations; the continued growth of the more formal publishing routes – academic journals and open access – well-researched research reports from established consultancies and thought leaders; and the continual growth of news and media content. This miscellany of content is further exploded as we adapt and share it. To paraphrase Dale, today anyone can share anything. As a consequence, at an organizational and personal level, the risks of not obtaining and not recognizing essential content grow apace.

So what’s the solution? Dale argues cogently for renewed attention to content creation in order to assist folk and organizations to distinguish the `signal from the noise’. In short, `content curation can provide a structure, a process, a system and a discipline to help us find (and use) more relevant information’. We all curate content as we work making links between apparently disconnected information to enhance our personal knowledge base and grow our insight. We share our expanded knowledge with our peers as trusted co-workers or gatekeepers. (The gatekeeper role has long been identified as an effective information filter in many fields, simplifying collective knowledge growth and contributing to increased team performance; Metoyer-Duran, 1993.) The skills needed for effective content curation closely match those of information professionals (using tools to find and filter content, organizing information, analysing and making sense of information and sharing it effectively etc). But understanding the context and subject matter is just as important and raises the bar for the information profession. We have long argued about the need for information professionals to be skilled in the areas they support. The rewards are obvious, for example, being labelled as a knowledge expert and a content curator is a route to opening up many more opportunities.

I don’t think I need to convince anyone who regularly uses the Internet, that finding useful and relevant information amongst the volumes of dross we get from advertisers, marketers, brand mangers and those-that-want-to-be-heard-but-have-nothing-of-value-to-say (which, unfortunately, accounts for the majority of content that swills around our in-boxes and search results), is becoming increasingly difficult. Information is being pumped at us almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This was bad enough when we were shackled to an office desk and a “lobotomised” corporate desktop PC – you know, the ones where IT security bods and corporate policy makers have surgically removed all of the useful productivity applications – but now that most of us are connected 24 x 7 via our smartphones, tablets and laptops, information can get to us wherever we are and whatever we’re doing.

So, it’s probably meaningless to conduct a survey that asks people if they suffer from information overload, because I can guarantee that the vast majority would say “yes”. The paradox is that many people don’t realise that they are in control of the situation, and not – as they perceive – helpless victims of this context-free information deluge.

It helps if you’re not a victim of FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out, where you need to sleep with your smartphone under your pillow in case someone sends you an email or SMS text in the middle of the night (which some of you must of course respond to straight away). If so, you may need sort of expert psychological help – which I’m not qualified to give!

But what about all of those unsolicited emails you get, or the inane Tweets you read, or the random messages from people you don’t know (or would rather not know) on various social networks? When was the last time you cleared out the clutter in your various in-boxes and put in place some intelligent filters that prevented the “mad and the bad” information from ever reaching you? When did you last trawl through your newsletters and unsolicited email sources to unsubscribe from anything you don’t need or don’t read? Just deleting them will not make them go away – they’ll be back next week or next month.

The worst of it is that with all of this useless information reaching you, you’re liable to miss the good stuff. Finding useful and trusted sources of information is becoming an art. This is the stuff you want, because it’s relevant to your job, profession or personal life. This is where you need to be a “Digital Content Curator”.

The role of the curator has been around for centuries, but specifically associated with people who practice their profession in the hallowed halls of the world’s museums and galleries. To suggest that digital content curators all bring the same depth and breadth of knowledge as a professional museum curator might be somewhat missing the point.

Curation, when it comes down to it, is all about creating value from building collections. Curators know that the sum of an experience can be greater than the parts alone. And you don’t always have to be an expert to tell a decent story.

Curators perform four basic actions; they find quality sources of content; they evaluate, organise and store the key elements of the content; they add insight and personal knowledge to what they’ve found; they publish and share through their preferred channels.

I’ll go out on a limb here, and go against the combined wisdom of many expert digital content curators and say that you don’t have to do that final step, publishing and sharing, if the audience is yourself. Perhaps that seems strange, but personal bookmarking is a type of content curation. You’ve found, evaluated, organised and stored something that you have found personally valuable, and you want to be sure you can find it again and use it.

In his Future Show episode 3: The Future Of Work and Jobs, Futurist Gerd Leonhard talks about the growing trend for machine-automation (e.g. robots) taking over repetitive and routine jobs, and identified digital content curation as one of the new and emergent jobs for 21st century knowledge workers, where creativity and human intelligence – things that can’t readily be ‘roboticised’ – will become more prevalent.

Perhaps this partly explains why content curation is becoming an increasingly popular search term, according to Google Trends. More and more people are tuning into the topic and wondering if it’s something they should know more about. (The answer to that is “Yes!).

But to go back to the title of this post – waving or drowning. The only way we can ever make sense of the world we now live in, where information permeates every aspect of our on-line presence, is to use and develop our cognitive skills to effectively apply filters that separate the signal from the noise; to know how and where to find trusted sources of content; to sort, organise and categorise information, and to ultimately create value and useful/actionable knowledge – for ourselves and for our audience (if we have one).

This, then, is “content curation”. A skill as important as learning how to swim, and just as relevant if you don’t want to drown in a sea of (useless) information!

]]>http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/waving-or-drowning-content-curation-is-your-lifeline/feed/0Mastering Digital Content Curationhttp://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/mastering-digital-content-curation/
http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/mastering-digital-content-curation/#commentsMon, 03 Nov 2014 15:10:23 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2137Read MoreMastering Digital Content Curation]]>The next workshop starts in London on 13th November. Details on the TFPL website. There are still a few places left if you book soon.

If you’re not too sure what “content curation is all about”, I think this quote from Steve Rosenbaum explains it in a nutshell:

“In a world of bandwidth and content abundance, we’re overwhelmed with data, tweets, blogs, check in’s and media. It used to be we surfed the web. Now the waves of the web are just too big. Curation is the new magic that makes the web work. Bringing the web back to human scale with human filters you trust and love. A powerful mix of passion and context turns noise back into signal.” Source: 5 Tips For Great Content Curation

Effective curation requires technology and tools to find, filter and validate content at the speed of the real-time web. It requires knowledge domain experts who can interpret and add insight to the content they are harvesting. It needs people who can utilise the power of networks and networking to source relevant and reliable information. In short, these are the essential skills of the 21st Century knowledge worker. This workshop will focus on developing these skills.

If you’re still confused about “Content Curation”, here’s a slide deck that might explain.

]]>http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/mastering-digital-content-curation/feed/8Gamification: making work fun, or making fun of work?http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/gamification-making-work-fun-or-making-fun-of-work/
http://collabor8now.com/knowledge-management/gamification-making-work-fun-or-making-fun-of-work/#commentsThu, 25 Sep 2014 09:52:06 +0000http://collabor8now.com/?p=2104Read MoreGamification: making work fun, or making fun of work?]]>

This is an abbreviated abstract from a research paper I submitted to Sage publications on the topic of “Gamification”. The full article is available from the June 2014 edition of Business Information Review.

Introduction:

Gamification is about understanding and influencing human behaviours that organizations want to encourage amongst their workforce or customers. Gamification seeks to take enjoyable aspects of games – fun, play and challenge – and apply them to real-world business processes. Analysts are predicting massive growth of gamification over the next few years, but is there any substance to the benefits being touted? This article takes a critical look at the potential of gamification as a business change agent that can deliver a more motivated and engaged workforce.

This article seeks to explain what gamification is and answers the following questions:

1. Does gamification have a place as an effective business change agent?2. Can gamification encourage knowledge sharing behaviours and better employee engagement within and across the enterprise?

What is ‘gamification’?

The term ‘gamification’ has been used since around 2003 as a way to influence online and real-world behaviour. Software applications or mobile apps encourage people to
do a variety of things – sometimes play games, sometimes respond to particular stimuli or situations – with rewards for users exhibiting the ‘right’ behaviours. Gamification makes a game out of something – and game design has certain conventions. Every game has to have rules, tools, mechanics and players. Rules and tools are specific to each game, dependent on what outcomes are desired. The players are either employees or exist outside
of the corporate firewall. Therefore there are two main types of gamification – enterprise gamification and social gamification.

The most common game mechanics are:

achievements (Experience points, Levels, Bonuses etc.);

exercises (Challenges, Discoveries etc.);

synchronizing with the community (Leaderboards, Collaboration etc.);

result transparency (Experience bars, Continuous feedback etc.);

time (Countdown, Speed etc.);

luck (Lottery, Random Achievements etc.).

The Science

Gamification is much more than simply rewarding points and badges; it’s aboutunderstanding and influencing the human behaviours that companies want to encourage among their users. Gamification is founded in the fundamentals of human psychology and behavioural science, and rests on three primary factors: motivation, ability level and triggers.

For a behaviour to change, 3 things have to be present: a trigger, the ability to do the behaviour, and motivation. And the last two, motivation and ability, are trade-offs. That means if you have low amounts of ability, you need to have more motivation. If you have low amounts of motivation you need to make the behaviour steps really small.

When done correctly, gamification provides an experience that is inherently engaging and, most importantly, promotes learning. The elements of games that make for effective gamification are those of storytelling, which provides a context, challenge, immediate feedback, sense of curiosity, problem-solving, a sense of accomplishment, autonomy and mastery.

Typical components of a gamified application include:

1. Points – points are allocated for specific high value behaviours and achievements.

8. Anti-Gaming Mechanics – used to set limits on how often a behaviour can be rewarded.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Rewards

Activities are intrinsically motivating if they help you fulfill your inherent desire for personal growth by achieving some kind of competence (“I am good, getting better, mastering this”); if they help learners feel they are working towards their own set of goals with some amount of autonomy (“I am in control and doing things that match my values”); and if they contribute to the sense of relatedness that learners feel by being part of a group, or some kind of purposeful movement larger than themselves (“I am a part of something here that I think is kind of cool or important”).

Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand is all the trifling enticements and punishments that are used to make subjects do what they are told to do: salaries, grades, threats of prison time, as well as points, badges, leaderboards, and other tools of gamification.

The following table gives some examples of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards.

Table 1 – Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Rewards

Extrinsic

Intrinsic

Money

Recognition

Points/Badges/Trophies

Personal Achievement

Prizes

Responsibility

Penalties

Power

Quests

Fun

Progress bars

Mastery

To further illustrate the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic reward mechanisms, we can look at an extract from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In this scene, Tom’s aunt orders him to whitewash a fence as punishment for playing truant from school. He doesn’t relish this so he tricks several of his friends to do the job for him by convincing them that the task is so enjoyable that he doesn’t want their help. The boys beg him to let them take over – they even pay him with twelve marbles, a piece of blue glass to look through, a kite, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, and a dead rat he could swing from a string. Twain wrote: “Tom had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make someone covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain”.

If Tom had money, he might have tried to buy his way out of his plight, an “extrinsic reward”. Although they would have benefited from the cash, their hearts would not have really been in the task, which they would have categorised as “work”. Instead, Tom served up an “intrinsic reward”, by convincing his friends that whitewashing a fence was fun. Having started the task, they would convince themselves that it was fun, and not work, and therefore avoiding cognitive dissonance.

(NB In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the excessive mental stress and discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time).

Gamification in the Workplace

Companies deploying gamification fall into two main categories: Consumer and service organisations that are looking for improvements to their loyalty solutions, and companies that want to find the right employee engagement tools.

These are just some of the benefits a company can hope to achieve through a well-implemented gamification strategy:

Increased motivation and productivity of employees

Alignment of goals and expectations of employees, stakeholders and customers with the company’s goals.

Employees fully engaged with new company initiatives

Employees converted into advocates of the company

However, a problem faced by many companies is getting things done within legacy structures and cultures that – often unwittingly – inhibit the free flow of knowledge and expertise. Resistance to change can be endemic; business processes remain locked and impervious to improvement. But there is growing evidence that, given the right incentives, people and behaviours will change. Perhaps surprisingly these incentives do not have to be financial; there are many other triggers that can deliver more effective knowledge sharing and encourage employee and customer loyalty.

A gamification strategy aimed at increasing employee engagement could consider the following triggers:

As mentioned earlier, it is best to avoid giving financial incentives and rewards since this is more associated with “normal work” as opposed to “fun” – an important element of any gamification strategy. However, the gamification software must be able to track and measure these activities, for example, number of “Likes”, number of comments, number of downloads etc. But don’t limit the incentives to extrinsic rewards such as points, badges and trophies, which are fairly one-dimensional. Consider also the behaviours that are driven by intrinsic rewards (see Table 1). Involving the users in the gamification design is essential, and should enable the right balance to be achieved between extrinsic and intrinsic reward mechanisms.

Companies that want to boost their internal training programmes are also looking at gamification as a way to increase engagement and friendly competition. The willingness to play, to fail, and to try again, could be said to be the essence of what makes learning a compelling activity. These types of rewards need to be much more frequent than the annual review/award, and encourage staff to always be working towards achievements. The engagements need to focus more on emotional experience in order to keep people with short attention spans properly interested. When done well, gamification can be used to shape user interactions and to push people to go further, to build up streaks of learning, and to condition behaviour.

Some examples of where gamification is being used for business improvement or environmental change:

At Google, engineers have been able to spend an in-house currency called ‘Goobles’ on server time — often a scarce resource at Google.

SAP created a game to encourage workers to carpool in order to reduce the company’s carbon footprint.

Engine Yard increased the response rate for its customer service representatives by 40% after posting response-time leaders for employees to see (source: Society for Human Resource Management)

JOIZ, a Swiss television network, increased sharing by 100% and social referral traffic by 54% with social infrastructure and gamification technology (source: Gigya)

Spotify and Living Social replaced annual reviews with a mobile, gamified solution. Over 90% of employees participated voluntarily (source: Huffington Post)

Halton Borough Council has introduced RFID tags on bins to provide accurate tracking of the recycling efforts of each household. Points are awarded based on the weight of recycled products. The points can be redeemed at local businesses for goods and services.

One obvious question about gamification in the workplace and the examples given above, is whether these behaviour changes are sustainable over the long term? The jury remains out on this point – unless you know differently – any evidence gratefully received!

Implementation Good Practice

While gamification has the potential to become an integral part of the workplace, it must be done right. Considering how difficult it is to build a hit game, it should come as no surprise that building successful gamification within a work environment is no different; there are many more ways to do it wrong than right. From small mistakes that waste your time to disasters that can turn users against you. Gamification should be well understood and planned out prior to implementation. Some points to consider during the planning process include:

Be sure your organisation’s goals for using gamification are clear. This is an especially important step to take before getting too deep into the effort. It is far better to determine all of the goals of a gamification programme during the beginning stages.

Think carefully about your company culture. What types of rewards will motivate employees, andhow can you build out a recognition programme that ties into the prevailing culture.

Focus on what behaviours you are trying to encourage or discourage first, and work backwards from there. Identify the activities and triggers that are most likely to influence the behaviour change you wish to achieve.

Changing the rewards system periodically will ensure employees remain engaged and not get bored with the same-old options.

Don’t develop game mechanisms that dole out points and badges like sugar pellets every time the user hits the right lever.

Don’t “game” the workers. Companies need to design game systems that enhance work rather than exploiting their workers.

Don’t use money as a motivator. Research, as summarized by Daniel Pink’s famous TED talk[, states that extrinsic rewards rarely work. Introducing money automatically makes the activity about money—other motivations, such as taking pride in a job well done or collaborating as part of a team, are set aside

Conclusion

Gamification is being touted as a way to immerse more enterprise users more deeply in business processes and tasks. Gamification borrows heavily from interactive and reward & recognition elements from online games, and – if done correctly – maps them to business goals to drive engagement, interactivity, participation, and (hopefully) better results. The thinking is simple: the more interesting it is, the more likely people are to engage.

However, there are two conflicting trends emerging: on the one hand analysts are predicting that organisations will allocate 2.8 billion USD (1.7 billion GBP) in direct spending on gamification by 2015, and yet also predict that 80% of Gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives (Gartner).

At its core, gamification is about engaging people on an emotional level and motivating them to achieve their goals. One way to motivate people is to present them with compelling and personalised challenges; encourage them as they progress through levels, and get them emotionally engaged to achieve their very best.

This all sounds very good, but I strongly suspect that implementers will place more focus on aspects of the technology and the mechanics (bells and whistles) of gamification applications than engaging with (and understanding) its potential users. After all technology is relatively simple to understand whereas people are far more complex. The long and painful history of failed projects usually stems from the tendency to focus on technology first and people (users) second.

So, to answer the two questions I posed at the beginning of this piece:

Does gamification have a place as an effective business change agent?

Can gamification encourage knowledge sharing behaviours and better employee engagement within and across the enterprise?

I believe the answer to both is ‘yes’…but as with any new product or service, it really comes down to how it is implemented. User involvement in the design and implementation of a gamification strategy is essential. Otherwise users (employees, customers, stakeholders) risk being “gamed” or manipulated, which could ultimately bring about the opposite behaviour to what was originally intended, e.g. mass defections.

Until and unless organisations begin to focus more on motivating people – customers, stakeholders, employees – to achieve their own goals and less on the organisation’s goals, I’m with the analysts in predicting that within 5 years, gamification will be nestling within the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’. Perhaps the secret here is for organisation’s to work towards aligning their goals with those of their employees and customers.

Any organisation considering introducing a gamification strategy must, as a minimum:

understand the target audience they intend to engage;

recognise the behaviours they want to change;

understand what motivates their audience and maintains their engagement;

define how success will be measured.

I’m also sure there will also be some amazing success stories, where gamification has delivered better user engagement, increased employee satisfaction and advocacy, or opened up opportunities for innovation, but this will depend largely on how willing the industry is to share good practice. And only time can tell whether or not these desirable behaviour changes are sustainable over the long term.

Whatever happens over the next 2- 5 years, we’re all going to hear a lot more about gamification.